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VC Dharmash Mistry hears a pitch from the founders of PlanVine.

Dharmash Mistry has spent the last four years looking for the next billion-dollar company. A venture capitalist in London with the firm Balderton Capital, he specializes in recognizing Europe's hotest technology startups; he's met hundreds of entrepreneurs, read reams of due diligence and spent hours tinkering with new websites and software products. To help get through the glut of new innovators, he'll sometimes hold a rapid-fire pitching session -- a kind of pot-luck of technology startups. For his latest session last month, Mistry invited Forbes along to get a peek at what goes on, and find out how tech entrepreneurs pitched him their ideas in just 15 minutes.

The level of response to his pitching events is often huge, and a testament to how big the start-up scene is getting in Europe, and London in particular. For this latest session, Mistry blocked out a morning in his calendar, then announced his availability for pitches on Twitter. Within a few hours, he'd heard back from 41 applicants. Mistry then whittled them down to 11 startups who would each have 15 minutes to sell him their idea. The goal for each founder was to secure another meeting with Mistry to talk about future investment, advice or an introduction to someone else that could lead to investment or advice.

Typically, startups get much more time to pitch to venture capitalists like Mistry - 30 to 40 minutes, say - so these rapid-fire pitching rounds were for people who had yet to get a formal meeting with a London VCs like Balderton, Accel or Index. For Mistry it also offered a chance to spot talent before other VCs did.

I grabbed a coffee with Mistry, who wore jeans and a black blazer, just before the session started, and learned that the startups he would be speaking to were all at different stages of development. "I have no idea how ready some of these guys are," he said. We then walked across the street and into the offices of TechHub, a popular start-up incubation center in Shoreditch, East London. Here the receptionist led us to Mistry's "pitching room," a small meeting space in the center containing two, low-seated leather couches and a coffee table. In this stark setting, Mistry would be quietly asking himself three questions about each startup's idea.

1. Could this be big? Good ideas abounded, but only a few could be hugely successful. The best VC funds had a few blockbuster hits that brought in 10 times their original investment. Mistry's Balderton Capital had a hand in Bebo, Betfair and LoveFilm, while its former parent fund Benchmark Capital had invested in eBay, making 60 times its original investment. "Big" essentially meant a valuation of between $250 million and $1 billion, seven years after investing. Mistry only saw about 10 billion-dollar companies in Europe, like LoveFilm or Skype, that were either still seeking investment, floated or acquired.

2. Was the market big? Great ideas still needed mass appeal to make money.

3. How disruptive was the startup? Mistry was looking for companies that looked like they could create a new market or change the rules of the game. Companies like PayPal and Wonga, for example, were both reinventing the bank.

Soon a stream of young, male entrepreneurs took turns entering the room to pitch their websites or software business. Most carried a laptop to show off their product, while a couple came in empty-handed with only their voices to tell the story. While some hands twitched with nerves as they clicked through PowerPoint presentations, others belonged to serial entrepreneurs who were calm and confident.

Among the startups pitching that day, some of whom were still in beta mode, were:

CrowdIPR, an online network of intellectual property experts who, for a fee, could help solve quandaries about patents. It used human expertise instead a searchable database, and could help tech companies avoid lawsuits.

LetEngine, a peer-to-peer property rental network that helped landlords vet their future tenants and avoid using an estate agent.

Lectrio, a website for college professors who wanted a single place to easily upload their notes and presentations for class.

PlanVine, a monthly subscription service that discovers and books interesting events for you around town.

Battl, an online network that allows you to take part in head-to-head sports competitions with anyone, anywhere in the world, with local, national and worldwide rankings.

The sessions were fast-moving, but Mistry picked up the mechanics of each business model within a few minutes, and for most he could already name one or two competitors that the entrepreneurs had never heard of themselves.

There were three questions he tended to ask each startup founder:

1) What problem are you trying to solve?

2) Who is your target market and how big is it?

3) What's unique about your product versus what is offered in the market today?

He would never directly ask the entrepreneurs if they thought their companies could be "big" or how disruptive they were. Instead he would ask how they intended to build up more users, "liquidity" being his key word. Often he would advise them to make their service free so that it could be tinkered with and improved according to consumer demand. Don't start with too many features and services, he would explain, start with a few products and build out.

"So what do you need from us?" he would eventually ask. The entrepreneurs would often say they needed investment to hire new staff, or sometimes just a few words of advice.

One or two didn't have a product yet, and for that Mistry suggested they be flexible: "Learn from your customers without building too much up front, then work with a simple product which you can continually improve," he said. "Test, learn, iterate."

Not all the entrepreneurs liked hearing that they needed to be more flexible, but Mistry explained that companies had to learn from demand; ie. from their consumers. "Make simple products," he added, as the clock was running down. "Don't over-engineer them because it always pivots and changes according to demand."

Once their time was finally up, Mistry would wish each entrepreneur luck. For the truly fortunate, he would also ask that they keep him posted and sometimes (more promisingly) ask them to contact him again in the next few days. Fifteen minutes was precious little time, but for some it was just the promising start they needed.